Gorilla Glue deploys Oracle Cloud for greater efficiency and automation

The Gorilla Glue Company has been a leading manufacturer of adhesives, moisturizers, and tools for over two decades. The company’s notable brands, including Gorilla Glue, Gorilla Tape, O’Keeffe’s, and Lutz Tool, offer a broad range of go-to products that deliver results for everyday consumers, DIYers, and seasoned professionals.

The company’s core values and dedicated workforce of 850 employees have fostered growth since its founding; however, disparate legacy systems—some over 20 years old—began to stifle progress toward global expansion. Moreover, years of evolution forced Gorilla Glue to deploy numerous bolt-on tools and customize aging software to cope, which only complicated the technology landscape.

Manual work and cumbersome paper-based processes were frequent across the company’s finance and supply chain landscape. For instance, users had to manually match financial transactions, reconcile payments, send purchase orders to suppliers, and load supply plans and demand forecasts to try and manage inventory. A lack of real-time, consolidated data resulted in financial planning processes disjointed from sales and operational planning, and offline spreadsheets hindered product tracing and profitability analysis and struggled to support decision-making.

After outlining its business requirements, Gorilla Glue began comparing top vendors in its search for new cloud-based technology. The company ultimately selected the unified suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM).

The idea of a single, global platform was integral to company leaders, who understood the value of standardizing processes across departments and regions for simpler operations. Integrated workflows and automation capabilities would help streamline complex, manual tasks and reduce reliance on the company’s various third-party tools. The cloud-native application suite would provide greater scalability to bolster Gorilla Glue’s global ambitions and support crucial new product introduction. In addition, Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics and Fusion SCM Analytics would allow users to take advantage of the company’s newfound consolidated data source. Real-time analysis would uncover underlying drivers of business outcomes to bolster decision-making and optimize operations.

With the help of its strategic partner Inspirage, Part of Accenture, Gorilla Glue embarked on the first phase of its journey by deploying key functionality within Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, and SCM across finance, supply chain, procurement, FP&A, and more.

The company created a more robust chart of accounts using Oracle Cloud ERP, improving financial insight through an enterprise-wide and entity-specific lens. This analysis helped Gorilla Glue categorize costs more effectively and lay the foundation for more efficient reporting by region, both of which were key to international expansion. The system also automated routine processes like transaction matching and payment reconciliations, eliminating time-consuming manual work for employees. A consolidated financial data source, Oracle Fusion Analytics, also allowed for more strategic analysis into areas including profitability by product and customer.

The company was able to better predict the impact of price changes, promotions, and the introduction of special product packages by enhancing its financial planning capabilities with features such as scenario modeling and what-if analysis within Oracle Cloud EPM. Thanks to seamless integration and a shared data model among applications, FP&A teams were able to easily access actuals and historical data from the company’s new cloud ERP, compare it to the latest estimates, and quickly forecast based on the most recent trends for more accurate planning and budgeting and more informed decision-making.

The company tapped Oracle Procurement to establish a new supplier portal and more consistent processes for managing supplier contracts and engagement, gaining better visibility into supplier performance, risk, cost management, and negotiating of more favorable terms. By combining these capabilities with those in Oracle Supply Planning, the business gained a single system to plan supply, production, and inventory across its supply chain. Additionally, Oracle Demand Management helped improve forecasting accuracy by more than 7%, which will help the company better predict demand for some of its seasonal products. All these operational wins translated to better bottom-line results and supply chain efficiency, including a 10% reduction in working capital, improved inventory turns, and increased on-time customer shipments.